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Jeff Gordon had not yet supplanted Dale Earnhardt Sr. as NASCAR’s most dominant driver—but according to Dale Earnhardt Jr., his dad must have already known something. “I was running late models up at North Wilkesboro and he introduced me to Jeff, in 1994,” Junior remembered while he and other Chase participants met with the media in New York Wednesday. “And if my dad introduced me to somebody—he only did that probably 10 times in my life…he was a busy guy, thinking about his race cars, and what he was doing with his life—and for him to take a minute to introduce me to someone, it must have been really important.”
Gordon knows one race can change everything.
“We need to get out from underneath that cloud and get more positive things surrounding us,” Gordon said. “And the only way we’re going to do that is to perform. Even if we come out of New Hampshire, just like Clint [Bowyer] last year, that was the whole story. ‘Oh, my gosh where did this guy come from?’ And that’s all anybody wanted to talk about. Things can turn around that fast. We recognize that. And the way our season had gone, that has to be our focus.”